I think this is a good idea. Hope that Tesla will put these Regenerative Shock Absorbers on new Tesla cars.
http://ev.com/regenerative-shock-absorbers-for-evs/
http://ev.com/regenerative-shock-absorbers-for-evs/
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The extra weight and cost is likely to be a problem with adoption for a long time.
Bosh did them too. There are a few threads as people read about them and post.
Something something gedanken experiment. If you really think the suspension in a car is consuming 50% of the car's power, then why is it not cooled like an engine block in an ICE? Surely it would rapidly overheat.
I saw a demo of a car using an electromagnetic suspension - instead of hydraulics it used electromagnets - the idea being that it was faster reacting. The power it put into the system was around 600 watts average. As a rough guess you might be able to recover about half of that which is 300 watts, for comparison the A/C in the Model S uses about 6000 watts.
It doesn't pay off, for all the extra bux spent doing that they could make the battery pack bigger, or car lighter, etc.
On its own maybe not so impressive, but add up 5% from regenerative shock absorbers, 5% from low rolling resistance tires, and 5% from aero wheels and you start looking at some real range.
Ditto. There is no more energy to recover from the suspension than what the existing shock absorbers generate as heat.